Tag: Chelsea

It has been claimed before that Jose Mourinho has a tendency to do or say just about anything in order to deflect from his or his teams shortcomings at any time. There were certainly plenty of shortcomings be to seen early on Saturday evening, when Chelsea were held at home by Swansea City with a performance every bit as lethargic as any seen during the pre-season. Since that match, Mourinho’s face has indeed been plastered all over the press – ever was it thus, and it’s unlikely that bookmakers would have offered particularly generous odds that the first Premier...

Good evening, and welcome to Sunday night at the football Palladium,our weekly chance to kick back, relax, empty our brains and watch some old football, because words can just be a little too much effort, sometimes. Tonight’s matches come from the tail end of the 1974/75 season, and feature a relegation four-pointer between Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea, a match between Everton and Sheffield United, a Second Division match between Norwich City and Nottingham Forest, as well as interviews with Steve Perryman and the Fulham – who’d just reached the FA Cup final – manager, Alec Stock. On top of...

Was it just a matter of striking coincidence or was there something more in the timing of a story in the Daily Mail which stated confidently that “Rivals” are “ganging up to ban City” with a challenge over the blue half of Manchester’s attempts to comply with regulations meant to limit the extent to which sheikhs, oligarchs and other ne’er do wells have started to pour money into some football clubs? After all, as these words are being written, the expensively assembled teams of Manchester City and Chelsea are preparing to take to the pitch at The City of Manchester Stadium for yet another testosterone-soaked Premier League “showdown.” The eyes of the world will be watching this evening – aren’t they always nowadays? – but the eyes of some will be focusing on annual accounts of Manchester City and how these tie in with UEFA’s much-vaunted (but seldom so far tested) Financial Fair Play Regulations. On Saturday evening, Jose Mourinho added his voice to a powerful – if not necessarily particularly numerous – choir of voices within the game of the opinion that UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules aren’t treated with the respect that they deserve. We have to remember, of course, that this is Jose Mourinho we’re talking about here, and that there is probably no level of eyeball-rolling irony that the Chelsea manager wouldn’t apply in the...

You’ve done too much, much too young, The Specials famously sang on their seminal 1980 hit. That particular ditty was an anthem to a lost youth and the doom of adding another statistic to the population. However, it would also appear to be a maxim that could be applied to Portuguese wonderkid Andre Villas-Boas, who as we all know has now had the button pressed on his Daniel Levy supervised ejector seat. Some people argue it was activated far too soon, and some argue it wasn’t pressed soon enough. Villas-Boas is a difficult one to fathom out, on the one hand coming across like a coaching revolutionary, with his encyclopedia of techno-management speak, and on the other hand, coming across like a complete chancer, who has spent far too much time with his head buried in a dictionary and suffocated under a mountain of statistics. At the time of writing, he still hasn’t managed to shake off the “mini Mourinho” tag, the obvious legacy of working alongside the self-styled Special One. Again. this is a tricky one, because in some despatches, he adopts a clear “I’m my own man” posture, but at the same time, wears at least a percentage of his historical association with Mourinho like a gaudy bracelet of recognition. Sky Sports and other media of their ilk, often wheel out two things when talking about him: firstly,...

Five days before Christmas 1980, Chelsea were chasing promotion back to the First Division. The leaders, West Ham United, were already sailing off into the distance at the top of the table, but that still left two automatic promotion places to play for – no play-offs in those days, of course – and Chelsea went into their last match before the Christmas rush in third place in the Second Division table, although their advantage was a slender one, with five points separating them from twelfth placed Orient – no “Leyton” prefix for them in those days, either – whose visit to Stamford Bridge was consider worthy of a visit from the cameras of Match Of The Day. Meanwhile, we also have very brief highlights – one goal per match – from two First Division matches played that weekend, as Manchester City played Leeds United at Maine Road and Brighton & Hove Albion took on championship chasing Aston Villa at The Goldstone Ground. You can follow Twohundredpercent on Twitter by clicking...